An Affective Tutoring System for Massive Open Online Courses

In the last years, the concept of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is widely regarded as new, innovative and creative model for free online learning at large-scale participation from the most prestigious universities around the world. On the other hand, the intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) have been developed to support one of the most successful educational forms “individual teaching”. Recent researches demonstrate that emotions can influence human behavior and learning, as a result, a new generation of ITS is born, that is Affective Tutoring System (ATS). However, there is no study showing the importance of using ATS in MOOCs. Therefore, this paper presents a novel approach for developing an affective tutoring system for the MOOCs, which is called ATS-MOOCs. Such system can easily help students to improve their learning performance by recognizing their affective states and then adapting the MOOC content accordingly. A prototype was developed and a case study was presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.